Tons of Republicans have told me that Dems’ position on trans issues freak them out. I point out how unimportant it is, but they don’t care. To them, men cannot be women. Democrats who say otherwise sound like aliens.
So I think first, red state Democrats need to run on this position. There are two genders. It doesn’t have to be cruel. They can still respect people’s pronouns and their workplace protections.
And I think the entire Democratic Party needs to en masse say we got it wrong on sports and locker rooms (bathrooms are fine). Sometimes, we don’t know how an idea will work in practice. When gay marriage was legalized, people guessed that platonic friends would marry to get benefits. But that didn’t happen. Gays in the military didn’t change anything.
If there were extraordinarily few trans athletes, and they were mediocre, it would have worked out fine. But it hasn’t turned out that way. While there are not tons of trans girls/women in sports, those that are are setting state records. And frankly, it’s pretty insulting to see a trans woman with a visible bulge take first in a cycling event, which now happens regularly.
One thing I hadn’t realized is that the large majority of trans woman don’t have bottom surgery. Most also identify as lesbians. There have been several high profile cases of intact males, sometimes sex offenders, using female locker rooms. This is happening just a few miles away from me at a YMCA pool. I think the person involved is probably trans, but they are apparently quite immodest. Young girls who likely have never seen an adult penis walk in to see them bending over naked to dry their hair. The Y can’t do anything because of California state law.
There have been also prison rapes.
The trans community will be extremely angry, but sometimes movements go too far. There was a big push to lower the age of consent in the 70s, and then we realized it was a bad idea. The trans movement needs to police these people taking advantage of the current system, as the gay rights movement did with NAMBLA early on. We need boundaries.
Should people be forced to use others' preferred pronouns? Should we push forward transgender and other lgbt individuals only because of their identity?
"Trump is, if nothing else, a shining example of the importance of individual agency in American politics and world affairs."
This is quite true and underappreciated. In our go-go internet news age and with our fragmentation, I thought never again would a single personality be able to be so influential or dominant, and that we would be left with a chorus of influential voices, one a bit louder on a day to day or week to week basis before the next new voice arose.
Well, that was wrong. The Trump phenomenon is proof positive for all others that, done right, individual influence on a popular level can be achieved....
I enjoy your column every day and am amazed that you could come up with so many intelligent observations to write about.
One question that I had--many centrist writers talk about the "Groups," that are radically left wing and have an outsized influence on the policies of the Democrats. Who are the Groups?
Matt in particular hates the Sunrise Movement. Others I would mention are the DSA, Indivisible, NRDC, and, to the extent that all Groups glom onto everyone else’s causes, some nominally innocuous ones like the ACLU.
A quibble on an otherwise great post, but, this piece is not fair to Jamie Bouie.
Matt writes:
“But it also doesn’t really make sense to recruit candidates who are moderate on those issues if Democrats, as a party, are going to say that… all DEI critics are aiming to re-impose segregation.”
Matt links there to Jamie’s recent column on the Trump-driven DEI unwinding… in which nowhere does it say that “all” the critics are aiming to reimpose segregation. It says that Trump and specific members of Trump’s team are aiming to reimpose segregation. Frankly, Jamie doesn’t even make a particularly good case for that more narrow point, but, that’s his case.
Who is saying that “all” DEI critics are aiming to reimpose segregation!? Matt is basically right about this stuff, but sometimes he seems to fight with a “dumb doctrinaire leftist” bogeyman in his head. No wonder Jamie doesn’t like him.
Also, I hope you can keep up the enthusiasm with the Common Sense Democrats project. It feels like you are one of the few sane voices writing in a clear and penetrating way about this. It’s important!
“Elected officials sometimes tell me that if they did X or Y or Z, they’d be at risk of losing a primary. I’m skeptical... There are no guarantees in life, and you can lose primaries in either direction. Incumbents who work hard and hustle rarely do.”
This is exactly right. Unfortunately, many or most incumbents don’t want to hustle - they prefer to coast and blend in. For the last 8 years, the best way to do that has been to keep “the groups” happy and toe the way-too-liberal line.
As is often the case, Charlie Sykes has cut to heart of what's happening with respect to foreign policy today: "We were expecting the Munich Conference, but what Trump is offering is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact."
Let the truth of that sink in for a while. Anything and everything we can do to frustrate Trump's plans now at home and abroad, and to defeat them in every election from now on, we have to do, with as many allies as we can summon.
Mr. Yglesias, I have been a free subscriber for a while now, and have converted to paid just now because the articles here alarm me. Not because you don’t have solid, well-reasoned ideas about governance, but because I think the whole premise of this blog represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the urgent problem we are facing as a country and I hope like hell that some of the Democrat leadership reads this.
Here’s a synopsis of what we have learned about the success of Trump: Most Americans don’t care a fig for policy. If you were to ask Trump voters why they support him, you will hear an abbreviated summary of talking points from Fox News. You’ll be attempted to read this summary as snark, but I don’t at all intend it that way. I am being perfectly literal. Ezra Klein recently had a NYT article about this - Trump understands that we are in a battle for attention. Most Americans live on their phones, that goes double for voters under 25.
This battle is taking place every day. Democrats have been impotent in the face of Trump’s constant barrage of lies and distortions because they are still laboring under the delusion that if you just provide people with enough facts and reasonable plans, they will see the truth. This is not the case. Trump’s strategy is successful because it is sensational, motivates people emotionally, is packaged in a short form to cater to very short attention spans, and is repeated continually in the forums where people live daily. It assumes people will never check facts, that laziness and the desire to be entertained will win out. This is the right conclusion.
Democrats will never realize their plans if they cannot retain voters’ attention. To b blunt, what is needed is to fight fire with fire - a firehouse of propaganda in the other direction. I’m talking memes and satirical cartoons pointing out the sheer stupidity and incompetence of the Trump administration. Short, sensational sound bites about Trump taking away your healthcare and handing truckloads of cash to billionaires. Don’t be afraid to play dirty. The playbook for this has been visible on the right for almost a decade - ridicule and outrage might be distasteful, but they are effective.
We don’t need a 10-point manifesto when the house is burning down. What good does it do to inherit a smoldering wreckage? We need a room full of twenty-somethings cranking out clever put-downs 24/7 and directing them at Trump, so we can start turning the tide now.
Before you roll your eyes, consider that Trump has just been re-elected using precisely this strategy.
Look, I'm really trying hard to be reasonable and thoughtful and all these good things. Really! But, like, Kash Effing Patel just got confirmed as head of the FBI, so King Donald* will now have a handy-dandy tool to beat political opponents with, banana republic-style!
I too want to return to the days when we can have thoughtful policy discussions, but I look at the Common Sense Platform and I look at [gestures around] all this and part of me thinks, as Koren said, that this is like preparing a ten-point plan to redecorate your house while the house is on f**king fire.
*John from FL, if you're reading this don't @me, I'm calling him King Donald because HE JUST CALLED HIMSELF KING ON XITTER. You know, for the lolz! How droll.
While I agree with most of your comments, I’m bemused by you standing with Sen. Sanders in decrying cuts in education spending. $1.1 billion for DEI and associated contracts are cuts of programs that you have acknowledged as fringe policies that contributed to Trump’s win. It was a bizarre amount of money dedicated to social engineering that was openly racist at its core.
Trump has created and will continue to create such obvious real world problems that it won’t take manifestos or think tanks or conferences to figure out where the Democrats go from here. I can see why this is frustrating for people wanting to push the Democrats in a new direction, but 2024 will be such a distant memory by 2026 and especially by 2028.
If Trump is bad enough, some progressive could win and then everyone will believe that progressivisim is the way forward, when it may be backlash to Trump.
It is hysterical the only tiny thing that congressional republicans even pretended to buck Trump on is Matt Gaetz and that was not due to any high-minded virtue it was merely because they personally didn't care for him. There has never been a more spineless, feckless, cowardly group of politicians in American history than our current congresspeople
So I'm not in your faction, but I have some advice.
You need to fix your staffing problem. The Biden Administration did not just appoint more Warrenite regulators. Democratic staffers overall have come to be drawn from the Millennial Left wing of the Party, associated with Warren and Bernie. The Party needs to discipline them and say: you're here to work for us, not us for you. If you don't like the politics being pushed by a Senator John Fetterman or a President Joe Biden, and you want to quit? There's the door. Screw you. We're going to run electable candidates with or without you.
This falls under points (6) and (8) of your manifesto.
Gore's "lockbox" was easy to mock and discredit because it was a mirage. Social Security taxes have ALWAYS been invested in US Treasury Bonds, because that's the way FDR and his Brain Trust designed the system, and as far as I know, there was never a serious, detailed proposal to change that. In other words, the money has always been loaned to the government, pretty much as collected.
The Social Security System was weakened by making it responsible for payments (e.g., disability benefits, extended survivor benefits, etc.) that its funding base wasn't designed to support, and runaway deficits that Presidents and Congresses have chosen to run up since Bill Clinton left office have endangered the system even more by endangering repayment, but the mere fact the the Treasury was using the money was a feature, not a bug, and certainly not corruption in any way.
Obama failed of his promise in many areas, but I'm someone who had to buy health insurance in the individual market without the support of an employer for quite a few years, so I have trouble calling the Presidency that left us the Affordable Care Act a flop.
ACA was a win for sure, but much of the rest was a flop. The stimulus packages funded the same reckless highway expansion that entrenched our shitty housing market. He failed to realign the USA in any meaningful way on foreign policy and instead expended political capital on troop surges in the Middle East, ultimately letting Trump get the pleasure of reshaping how we interface with the world. I would argue this is way more important than ACA.
Tons of Republicans have told me that Dems’ position on trans issues freak them out. I point out how unimportant it is, but they don’t care. To them, men cannot be women. Democrats who say otherwise sound like aliens.
So I think first, red state Democrats need to run on this position. There are two genders. It doesn’t have to be cruel. They can still respect people’s pronouns and their workplace protections.
And I think the entire Democratic Party needs to en masse say we got it wrong on sports and locker rooms (bathrooms are fine). Sometimes, we don’t know how an idea will work in practice. When gay marriage was legalized, people guessed that platonic friends would marry to get benefits. But that didn’t happen. Gays in the military didn’t change anything.
If there were extraordinarily few trans athletes, and they were mediocre, it would have worked out fine. But it hasn’t turned out that way. While there are not tons of trans girls/women in sports, those that are are setting state records. And frankly, it’s pretty insulting to see a trans woman with a visible bulge take first in a cycling event, which now happens regularly.
One thing I hadn’t realized is that the large majority of trans woman don’t have bottom surgery. Most also identify as lesbians. There have been several high profile cases of intact males, sometimes sex offenders, using female locker rooms. This is happening just a few miles away from me at a YMCA pool. I think the person involved is probably trans, but they are apparently quite immodest. Young girls who likely have never seen an adult penis walk in to see them bending over naked to dry their hair. The Y can’t do anything because of California state law.
There have been also prison rapes.
The trans community will be extremely angry, but sometimes movements go too far. There was a big push to lower the age of consent in the 70s, and then we realized it was a bad idea. The trans movement needs to police these people taking advantage of the current system, as the gay rights movement did with NAMBLA early on. We need boundaries.
Should people be forced to use others' preferred pronouns? Should we push forward transgender and other lgbt individuals only because of their identity?
Pronouns seem like basic courtesy to me.
"Trump is, if nothing else, a shining example of the importance of individual agency in American politics and world affairs."
This is quite true and underappreciated. In our go-go internet news age and with our fragmentation, I thought never again would a single personality be able to be so influential or dominant, and that we would be left with a chorus of influential voices, one a bit louder on a day to day or week to week basis before the next new voice arose.
Well, that was wrong. The Trump phenomenon is proof positive for all others that, done right, individual influence on a popular level can be achieved....
Matt:
I enjoy your column every day and am amazed that you could come up with so many intelligent observations to write about.
One question that I had--many centrist writers talk about the "Groups," that are radically left wing and have an outsized influence on the policies of the Democrats. Who are the Groups?
Matt in particular hates the Sunrise Movement. Others I would mention are the DSA, Indivisible, NRDC, and, to the extent that all Groups glom onto everyone else’s causes, some nominally innocuous ones like the ACLU.
A quibble on an otherwise great post, but, this piece is not fair to Jamie Bouie.
Matt writes:
“But it also doesn’t really make sense to recruit candidates who are moderate on those issues if Democrats, as a party, are going to say that… all DEI critics are aiming to re-impose segregation.”
Matt links there to Jamie’s recent column on the Trump-driven DEI unwinding… in which nowhere does it say that “all” the critics are aiming to reimpose segregation. It says that Trump and specific members of Trump’s team are aiming to reimpose segregation. Frankly, Jamie doesn’t even make a particularly good case for that more narrow point, but, that’s his case.
Who is saying that “all” DEI critics are aiming to reimpose segregation!? Matt is basically right about this stuff, but sometimes he seems to fight with a “dumb doctrinaire leftist” bogeyman in his head. No wonder Jamie doesn’t like him.
Also, I hope you can keep up the enthusiasm with the Common Sense Democrats project. It feels like you are one of the few sane voices writing in a clear and penetrating way about this. It’s important!
“Elected officials sometimes tell me that if they did X or Y or Z, they’d be at risk of losing a primary. I’m skeptical... There are no guarantees in life, and you can lose primaries in either direction. Incumbents who work hard and hustle rarely do.”
This is exactly right. Unfortunately, many or most incumbents don’t want to hustle - they prefer to coast and blend in. For the last 8 years, the best way to do that has been to keep “the groups” happy and toe the way-too-liberal line.
Hopefully, that is changing.
As is often the case, Charlie Sykes has cut to heart of what's happening with respect to foreign policy today: "We were expecting the Munich Conference, but what Trump is offering is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact."
Let the truth of that sink in for a while. Anything and everything we can do to frustrate Trump's plans now at home and abroad, and to defeat them in every election from now on, we have to do, with as many allies as we can summon.
+1000000
Mr. Yglesias, I have been a free subscriber for a while now, and have converted to paid just now because the articles here alarm me. Not because you don’t have solid, well-reasoned ideas about governance, but because I think the whole premise of this blog represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the urgent problem we are facing as a country and I hope like hell that some of the Democrat leadership reads this.
Here’s a synopsis of what we have learned about the success of Trump: Most Americans don’t care a fig for policy. If you were to ask Trump voters why they support him, you will hear an abbreviated summary of talking points from Fox News. You’ll be attempted to read this summary as snark, but I don’t at all intend it that way. I am being perfectly literal. Ezra Klein recently had a NYT article about this - Trump understands that we are in a battle for attention. Most Americans live on their phones, that goes double for voters under 25.
This battle is taking place every day. Democrats have been impotent in the face of Trump’s constant barrage of lies and distortions because they are still laboring under the delusion that if you just provide people with enough facts and reasonable plans, they will see the truth. This is not the case. Trump’s strategy is successful because it is sensational, motivates people emotionally, is packaged in a short form to cater to very short attention spans, and is repeated continually in the forums where people live daily. It assumes people will never check facts, that laziness and the desire to be entertained will win out. This is the right conclusion.
Democrats will never realize their plans if they cannot retain voters’ attention. To b blunt, what is needed is to fight fire with fire - a firehouse of propaganda in the other direction. I’m talking memes and satirical cartoons pointing out the sheer stupidity and incompetence of the Trump administration. Short, sensational sound bites about Trump taking away your healthcare and handing truckloads of cash to billionaires. Don’t be afraid to play dirty. The playbook for this has been visible on the right for almost a decade - ridicule and outrage might be distasteful, but they are effective.
We don’t need a 10-point manifesto when the house is burning down. What good does it do to inherit a smoldering wreckage? We need a room full of twenty-somethings cranking out clever put-downs 24/7 and directing them at Trump, so we can start turning the tide now.
Before you roll your eyes, consider that Trump has just been re-elected using precisely this strategy.
THANK YOU
Look, I'm really trying hard to be reasonable and thoughtful and all these good things. Really! But, like, Kash Effing Patel just got confirmed as head of the FBI, so King Donald* will now have a handy-dandy tool to beat political opponents with, banana republic-style!
I too want to return to the days when we can have thoughtful policy discussions, but I look at the Common Sense Platform and I look at [gestures around] all this and part of me thinks, as Koren said, that this is like preparing a ten-point plan to redecorate your house while the house is on f**king fire.
*John from FL, if you're reading this don't @me, I'm calling him King Donald because HE JUST CALLED HIMSELF KING ON XITTER. You know, for the lolz! How droll.
While I agree with most of your comments, I’m bemused by you standing with Sen. Sanders in decrying cuts in education spending. $1.1 billion for DEI and associated contracts are cuts of programs that you have acknowledged as fringe policies that contributed to Trump’s win. It was a bizarre amount of money dedicated to social engineering that was openly racist at its core.
Kash Patel got confirmed as head of the FBI.
F**k.
Trump has created and will continue to create such obvious real world problems that it won’t take manifestos or think tanks or conferences to figure out where the Democrats go from here. I can see why this is frustrating for people wanting to push the Democrats in a new direction, but 2024 will be such a distant memory by 2026 and especially by 2028.
If Trump is bad enough, some progressive could win and then everyone will believe that progressivisim is the way forward, when it may be backlash to Trump.
It is hysterical the only tiny thing that congressional republicans even pretended to buck Trump on is Matt Gaetz and that was not due to any high-minded virtue it was merely because they personally didn't care for him. There has never been a more spineless, feckless, cowardly group of politicians in American history than our current congresspeople
So I'm not in your faction, but I have some advice.
You need to fix your staffing problem. The Biden Administration did not just appoint more Warrenite regulators. Democratic staffers overall have come to be drawn from the Millennial Left wing of the Party, associated with Warren and Bernie. The Party needs to discipline them and say: you're here to work for us, not us for you. If you don't like the politics being pushed by a Senator John Fetterman or a President Joe Biden, and you want to quit? There's the door. Screw you. We're going to run electable candidates with or without you.
This falls under points (6) and (8) of your manifesto.
I don’t have any hope, honestly.
I feel like we left reality when the media mocked Al Gore’s lockbox. America is doomed.
Gore's "lockbox" was easy to mock and discredit because it was a mirage. Social Security taxes have ALWAYS been invested in US Treasury Bonds, because that's the way FDR and his Brain Trust designed the system, and as far as I know, there was never a serious, detailed proposal to change that. In other words, the money has always been loaned to the government, pretty much as collected.
The Social Security System was weakened by making it responsible for payments (e.g., disability benefits, extended survivor benefits, etc.) that its funding base wasn't designed to support, and runaway deficits that Presidents and Congresses have chosen to run up since Bill Clinton left office have endangered the system even more by endangering repayment, but the mere fact the the Treasury was using the money was a feature, not a bug, and certainly not corruption in any way.
Can we acknowledge that Obama's presidency was mostly a flop? He isolated himself from his cabinet more than any other president, besides Trump.
Obama failed of his promise in many areas, but I'm someone who had to buy health insurance in the individual market without the support of an employer for quite a few years, so I have trouble calling the Presidency that left us the Affordable Care Act a flop.
ACA was a win for sure, but much of the rest was a flop. The stimulus packages funded the same reckless highway expansion that entrenched our shitty housing market. He failed to realign the USA in any meaningful way on foreign policy and instead expended political capital on troop surges in the Middle East, ultimately letting Trump get the pleasure of reshaping how we interface with the world. I would argue this is way more important than ACA.